Game Design: Auras R Us

While working on the weapon powers and combat styles for my game, I had a couple cool ideas for how to handle activating and maintaining stances, keying powers off stances and modifying styles to suit the individual player/character, and started wondering about what to do with the Seven States of Magic. They need something.

Somewhere along the line, years back, I made this connection between stances and magical auras. Like, equivalence or somesuch. I didn’t know how to use the idea just yet, but it kicked around in the back of my mind for a long time. D&D makes auras more-or-less automatic and stances a “minor” action, which I dig.

Magic: the Gathering has yet to, well, as far as I’ve seen, really make Auras worth it. Since you tend lose them when you lose their target, they aren’t always worth it, though they can be used to add a lot of punch to some creatures and make certain strategies really viable. But straight-up creatures and spells are usually better.

Well, when I realized that I was going to have to change my weapon powers to stop being super-awesome unique deal-ies and make them stances instead (then the stances can be modified by each character to suit their needs, and it’s really cool), rather than using my system’s “minor” actions, I bumped them up to “medium.”

This does a couple of cool things, namely it leaves “minor” actions open to even smaller, faster things, and it also sets a precedent for other maneuver-level actions. Activating a weapon stance? Medium action. Walking across a room? Medium action. Moving into a flanking position? Medium action. Standing up? Medium action.

That’s when I realized I had my place for auras, right on par with stances. Auras are, in essence, magical stances. They have a different suite of options, and sometimes can be made to interact with weapons and vice versa, but there was my answer for what to do with auras. They won’t be automatic, they’ll be like switches. Auras up!